today's recap

groan. I just got out of rehearsal. We started at SIX and it is now 11 PM. This is of course following the five hours of rehearsal we had last night as well as the two hours of rehearsal we had yesterday morning.

Highlights of the evening:

I didn't have to play The Grand Old Duke of York and stand up and sit down all the time because my ankle is definitely worse than I thought it was earlier.

I suggested to my neighbor that if she wanted to play the bird whistle so badly, she could offer to sleep with the percussionist who is playing it in exchange for the privilege. I realized, too, that she played Paquette in Candide last winter and they did the strangest thing with her--they put her in this enormous Byzantine-esque getup and made her spin around randomly on stage during the Auto de Fey number. Bizarre. *

I enlightened several altos and sopranos on the whole fig issue--do they exist, and are they really in Fig Newtons? They were frightened of my figs at first but came around.

I don't think this whole experience is worthwhile enough to have had to miss the Cecilia Bartoli concert tonight (who, as I heard, wasn't wearing a giant bow on her head this time but instead had her hair in a toptail, naturally).

Oh, and I have firmly decided that our choir conductor is a sexy, sexy man.

When it's all said and done, though, the opera is truly beautiful. I thought it would be more of a bizarre Wozzeck kind of scenario with atonal (or twelve-tone music) that is unpleasant to listen to but musicologists think is brilliant or something. Not so. You can definitely tell that Enescu studied with Faure in the French impressionist tradition and it sounds like Debussy much of the time.

I can't WAIT to move!

*For any gentle readers unfamiliar with the work: Candide is Leonard Bernstein's (of West Side Story and of course, conducting fame) masterpiece. It is a setting of Voltaire's philisophical novel and is considered an "opera" yet is quite accessible and even had a Broadway stint in the early '90s. The Auto de Fey segment is a large chorus number, which is designed to be a witch hunt (and was composed during McCarthyism...you do the math--plus Bernstein was queer and Jewish)--the lyrics were contributed to by Richard Wilbur (a poet laureate of the US as well as an ex-prof at Smith College!), Dorothy Parker, and Lillian Hellmann. The words are along these lines--"What a day, what a day, for an auto de fey, what a sunny summer sky! What a jolly day for drinking and for watching people die! Hurry, hurry, watch 'em die....He don't mix meat and dairy, he don't eat humble pie. So sing a miserere and hang the bastard high."